As I speak with Rosemary Joshua – I’m at my office-at-home in London, she’s at Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam – I find myself wondering how many people in an average opera audience have the faintest conception of the level of skill and raw effort that is demanded from a young opera singer in the early part of their career, let alone from seasoned professionals.
When singers graduate from a music conservatoire, they have already put years of effort into developing their voice to become a proper musical instrument. As Joshua puts it, “It’s a very difficult thing to produce these tones from the tiny little vocal cords, the tiny muscles around, the breath, the resonance, all these things they spend years focused on and obsessing over.” Being able to produce an operatic voice at the required level and quality is a substantial accomplishment in itself, but so much more remains to be done before a singer can be fully fledged as a member of a major opera company. The Dutch National Opera Studio, the programme that Joshua has been running at DNO since its inception in 2018, exists to help young singers to bridge that gap.
Partly, it’s a question of context. Joshua is adamant that the conservatoires do a great job, given the time constraints available and the number of students they have. But those time constraints, the demands of examination systems and the sheer difficulty of perfecting the physical elements of a voice inevitably take their toll. Within a conservatoire, she explains, “you tend to judge yourself within those four walls. you become quite institutionalised in a way; you gauge your level by that of the talent around you. When you come to an international opera house, it's a big global universe; we have artists flying in from all over the world. Suddenly you have access to this level of expertise and you realise, wow, that's where I'm heading in ten years' time. So it's very inspiring.”
In the various opera singing masterclasses that I’ve watched, at DNO and elsewhere, the teachers have spend notably little time focusing on vocal production and quality, which seem to be generally in good working order, whereas they spend the majority of the class getting the student to really make something out of their interpretation of the text. The aria “Ah, Belinda, I am prest with torment”, from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, may have just 30 words, but in the class that I watched Joshua give at the Opera Studio, every word was put under the microscope. What kind of person is this queen? Why is she tormented? How has her emotion changed between each repeat? “I think people get so wrapped up in their instruments that they forget that the reason they are perfecting these instruments, whether it’s voice, piano, violin or double bass, is for communication. Singers forget that every piece of music was inspired by the words first.” She believes that a great way for a singer to learn an aria is to start by working through the text on its own, speaking it without the music, to get a mental grip on as many nuances of the text as possible and gain the ability to imbue that text with the greatest possible intensity of meaning. “For me, that's a sign of a true great artist. There are wonderful working singers who have wonderful careers and always look beautiful and sing great. But those real artists who always want to turn over that extra stone and find something else are quite few and far between. We have to encourage them.”
Most young singers, she says, are “very neat and tidy”, feeling the pressure of performance and never quite singing with abandon. By the time they’ve spent two years in the Opera Studio, this has improved: “I think they feel much more freedom and a level of confidence to leave behind the self-reflection and doubt and criticism. I’m very critical, and I tell them that we can’t have two critics in the room.”
I can attest at first hand that Joshua isn’t overstating the case when she says that “I am quite disciplined and I demand a lot from them individually” – she displays a terrier-like refusal to let go of a problem until it has been resolved. But she also refuses to tell singers exactly what they should and shouldn’t do. Rather, she wants them to use their own initiative to research whatever pieces they are singing. “We want them to dive in and find their true voice, not just the physical voice. What do they want to contribute? What do they have to say? How much further can they take all the wonderful work?”
The point of the Opera Studio is that there are endless opportunities to find inspiration. “Within a few months, I see very clearly those that are curious, those that will go over and above what is demanded of them in their studio curriculum. They go to concerts; they go and see the operas we're presenting here; they watch some of the great conductors rehearse; they sit in on studio productions and rehearsals and see how a director works with a group of international artists. So when those artists are curious and they go to see great performances, dress rehearsals or recitals in our Concertgebouw, they are inspired – it's impossible not to be. And this inspiration fuels them, it's like food. When they come onstage with this level of inspiration, the energy is completely different. They're not just doing it because they're trying to please this coach or that director or this conductor; they're on a mission.”
The singers also get inspiration from each other, particularly since they come from very diverse musical backgrounds. One of the Opera Studio’s current cohort is an Israeli mezzo with a background in jazz as well as classical singing, who “has a level of flexibility and imagination in her ornaments which is quite astounding”, the corollary of which is that for classical singing, Joshua feels she will eventually need to do the very non-jazz thing of settling down to a concrete plan for the ornamentation and trusting it. Another is “the first person to enter the building in the morning and the last person to leave every night. She's always absolutely prepared: I could send her anywhere and rely on the fact that she will deliver and everyone will be extremely happy with what she does.” If things can be arranged so that each singer gets the best from the others, everybody wins.
Joshua describes the pace of work at the Opera Studio as “pretty frenetic”. As well as the smaller roles that they get to perform on the main stage, the young singers also have to cover main stage repertoire as well as doing recitals, fundraisers, video streaming and more. The pressures on professional opera singers, Joshua says, are incomparably greater than those at the start of her own career, given the demands of a wider repertoire and of a greater range of acting skills, not to mention the expectation that singers should be able to dance, they often need to hop on a plane at 24 hours notice to attend an audition, and that casting directors will scrutinise the many performances that end up on Youtube. Given those pressures, guiding students to becoming fully fledged professionals is a significant achievement in itself. But what about the next stage – becoming true stars who give the kind of performances that take an audience’s breath away?
It’s rare that Joshua hears an incredible new insight into a piece. “But I will quite often hear a sound, a naked sound. I did yesterday, with a dramatic soprano – which are very few and far between. There were five notes in the voice which made me think ‘Oh my God, this is unbelievable material!’, and a musical instinct, a vocal intelligence, dramatic and emotional connection. So all she lacks is to have all these different strands joined up together.”
Those moments are what inspire Joshua and get her adrenalin running. And the resulting value is clear to her cohort of singers: we’ve spoken to several of them and heard comments like “she was exactly what I needed”, “her guidance has been precious to me” and even “she saved me, like a mother, she is so special to me”. As for Joshua, she’s clearly in her element: “The beauty of my position is that I can still really enjoy the music and I can enjoy the human voice as a vehicle of expression, but without all the stress of having to do it myself. The energy levels I use to teach are as high as they were when I was on stage and I hope this vitality helps to inspire the young artists I work with.”
This article was sponsored by Dutch National Opera.
